If you want a gambling site, you need to ban insider knowledge. If you want to generate accurate predictions, you want to encourage insider knowledge. But even then, the problem you mention can occur when an insider extreme bet happens at the last minute, because although you end up with an accurate prediction it isn't very useful in the few minutes before it becomes a fact. I don't know if there is a solution.

Time-weight predictions so that they're "worth" more the further in advance they are, converging to "worthless" as they approach the due date? Perhaps there is a way of making this result emerge "organically" from the rules of the system, rather than explicitly encoding it.

Depends on your goals. If you are the platform then there is nothing to solve: you’re running an illegal gambling website and currently getting away with it. If you are an inside trader you’re also doing well.

It’s not great for the gambling addicts but helping people better themselves doesn’t seem to be a theme in federal policy at the moment

Gambling sites probably do have it in their user agreements.

Further, "insider trading" in prediction markets is probably fundamentally illegal under existing commodities fraud laws in the US (I am not a lawyer,) but there's probably nobody actively policing it, and probably no precedent in how to prosecute the cases.

They should have some kind of controls:

- throttle how much a new account can wager, allowing more to be placed after the account gets older

- limit double-down bets to some fraction of your initial. To reduce the benefit of last minute wagers

- end wagering at a random time before the deadline.

- ban accounts that act in concert to evade the throttling. Or charge a hefty one-time fee or escrow that you eventually get refunded

I think it hinges on whether "any part of Venezuela" includes intangible "parts" like being able to tell them who to sell oil to, or whether it only refers to land/territory. The second paragraph implies that control over land is the point of the bet, but it doesn't explicitly say so. Control over the oil industry doesn't require control over land.

> Control over the oil industry doesn't require control over land.

That may be the case, but the US clearly does have control over the land, as they're literally telling Venezuela what to do with it.

That the US skipped a few steps of deploying troops on the same land first doesn't really seem to be here or there.

It does mention land too. Could be more explicit, but the intent seems clear enough.

Naive view is it's suppose to create public interest measures with real valued results.

Unfortunately, it's pretty easy to see something, eventually, like "X won't be seen in public after December 31st, 2026" essentially creating an assassination market.

Basically, boil finance bros down to sociopathy.